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Usually, the National Football League's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a straightforward pattern. It commonly functions as a kind of apology. We regret we underestimated your team in our preseason projections.

In theory, it's a clear-cut trajectory: the skipper who engineered the biggest turnaround wins the prize. However, it sparks an annual argument about preseason outlooks and whether we're truly rewarding excellent coaching or merely the most shocking shock.

However the current field is profoundly different. The group of contenders is remarkably strong. It has been the year of comebacks. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent conference winners fading and recent also-rans improving together. Under an normal year, a coach leading the his team to the top of the AFC would make him the stone-cold favorite. But in such a chaotic and entertaining year, he's up against multiple other elite candidates.

Below is how the projected ballot ought to look.

5) The Chicago Bears Coach, His Team, 11-5

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors adore QBs. This is a tradition. A certain coach in 2017. Kevin Stefanski in 2020. A third in 2022. When you transform a quarterback, you're halfway to winning the award.

The Bears' head coach not only fixed his young quarterback; he's freed him. Within an ideal environment, Williams has been afforded the opportunity to demonstrate his special ability. From Week 9, the Bears sit at fourth in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's prolonged excellence. With Johnson, the quarterback has become increasingly confident, less reckless, and has eagerly submitted to the gameplan instead of freelancing. It is an attack constructed solely in Johnson's image: a bully-ball run game, a steady dose of play-action passes and a imaginative passing attack that frees wide-open targets consistently. Williams has capitalized. And when openings weren't available, he's been able to spin magic from broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a clear offensive vision. Virtually every gamble – rebuilding the offensive line, featuring the tight ends, turning the QB into a rhythm passer – has succeeded. This is uncommon for a rookie skipper. And it's rarer still for a leader who walked into the organization with the level of hype Johnson did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the hottest name on the coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no guarantees. Somehow, Johnson has met the hype – and even surpassed them. He's demonstrated not only to be a scheme dork but the type of leader that can breathe new life into an organization.

In a typical season, he would be the overwhelming favorite. But this isn't a normal season!

The area where Johnson's candidacy runs a bit unstuck is on defense. The Bears presently sit in the bottom third in defensive success rate. They are living on turnovers, and turnovers are famously inconsistent. Defensive minds can focus on creating turnovers, but no one can ensure it. Johnson is on the list because the offensive production is real. He's not higher because variance is doing an outsized share of the defensive work. If not for a couple breaks of the ball, the team would be two victories worse off. It's been an exceptional turnaround, and the core is established for long-term success. But Johnson comes up short in this ranking.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, Jacksonville Jaguars, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a comparable spot to Johnson. He's a fellow first-time leader who has masterminded a rapid resurgence. Over the stretch run of the year, he has his franchise quarterback playing the best all-around ball of his professional life. And he's also overseen the remaking of a defensive unit that now ranks fifth in the NFL in EPA per play.

Even more notably, Coen has excelled at the intangibles stuff, which wasn't a guarantee after his initial press conference appearances and some of his preseason moves.

The coach took over Jacksonville with an exceptionally inexperienced staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the ideal coaching cocktail of new ideas and veteran savvy, he hired newbies. From the leader on down to assistants to position coaches, the Jaguars are filled with rookies. That kind of setup is exciting in theory, but often collapses in reality – as past failures are a cautionary tale – because everyone is figuring out a their job on the fly. Yet Coen has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

After an initial hot beginning, there was a possibility that the season would go off the rails. A mid-year collapse had the Jags wobbling once more. That's typically when coaches overcorrect. Coen didn't. Instead, he streamlined the approach. The offense stopped pursuing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach refocused the offense around key players and the ground attack, and asked Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The outcomes are obvious. The Jaguars have won multiple games consecutively and will be the AFC's number three playoff seed. Coen gets the tiniest deduction in the standings because he took over a talented team, but he has proven he can maximize that roster.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, His Team, Their Record

Every Coach of the Year case has a defining decision. For the Seahawks coach, it was his QB decision.

Moving on from a incumbent, bringing in a different quarterback and partnering him with an innovative play-caller could have ended the campaign in October. Rather, it made it. By the middle point of the season, the new QB was an MVP contender. He has regressed since that hot streak, dropping to a lower rank in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the season, putting him just one spot ahead of other QBs.

Still